The best laid plans of mice and men…

Entries Tagged as 'Pornography'

I watched a documentary called Inside Deep Throat — and I found it far more interesting than I think I ever found the movie.

The documentary talks about the changes occurring on the sexual landscape of America… while the sixties might have been referred to as the sexual revolution, it was really the early seventies where the battle of sexual expression was waged.

The movie was a landmark in many respects — but it’s success really had little to do with the quality of the movie, but rather the legal battles it caused — even though a presidential (appointed by Richard M Nixon) commission had already recommended that laws controlling pornography be repealed since they were largely unenforceable and that pornography caused no real risk to adults.

Watergate was only one of Nixon’s lies.

Sure the movie broke a great deal of new ground in film in general and porno specifically… but what it really broke was political and social stigma.

The trial in New York City (Judge Tyler ruled the file “obscene”) and an article in The New York Times catapulted the movie to the most profitable movie ever — $600 million US for a movie that originally cost only $25,000 to make.

The movie was eventually outlawed in 23 states; and the FBI harassed the director, producer, financiers, and theater owners.

Nixon’s four appointed Supreme Court Justices gave censorship a leg up; initially the feminist movement and the “protect our children” radicals supported the ban on expressive file; but steadily community standards changed possibly because of the VCR (and later DVD) and individuals began to demand their freedom of expression.

In most part of the country today individuals are free to choose; but believe me, there are still backward places that attempt to legislate morality — oppression controlled by the radical Christian right.

Below is a summary of court cases revolving around obscenity.

1957 Roth v. US – the Supreme Court defined obscene material is that which lacks any “redeeming social importance.” The Supreme court combined the cases wof Roth v. US and Alberts v. California.

1964 Jacobellis v. Ohio – the Supreme Court reverses a state obscenity ruling, but issues four separate opinions laying the ground work for confusions.

1966 Memoirs v. Massachusetts – the Supreme Court attempts to better define the ruling in Roth v. US. A work had to be proved by censors to: 1) appeal to prurient interest, 2) be patently offensive, and 3) have no redeeming social value.

1973 Miller v. California – the Supreme Court reinforces that obscenity was not protect by the First Amendment and established the Miller test but acknowledged “the inherent dangers of undertaking to regulate any form of expression,” and said that “State statutes designed to regulate obscene materials must be carefully limited.” 1) whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards (not national standards, as some prior tests required), would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest; 2) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions specifically defined by applicable state law; and 3) “whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”

1973 Paris Adult Theatre I v. Slaton – the Supreme Court upheld a state court’s injunction against the showing of obscene films in a movie theatre restricted to consenting adults; however, the Court differentiated the case from 1969 Stanley v. Georgia.

1990 FW/PBS v. City of Dallas – the Supreme Court ruled the city ordinance attempting to regulate “expressive businesses” as unconstitutional.

1999 Free Speech Coalition v. Reno – the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against section 2556(8) of the Child Pornography Prevention Act (CPPA) stating 1) the statue is not content-neutral and aims to curb specific expression; 2) the statute was not in line with Supreme Court decisions which have held that states can only criminalize child pornography when the laws “limit the offense to works that visually depict explicit sexual conduct by children below a specified age” – something the CPPA failed to do; 3) no demonstrated link to harm to real children has been demonstrated; and 4) the language is too vague and over-broad, allowing for arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement.